The Meadow Annual Literary Arts Journal 2018

pair? Besides, aren’t they more valuable together? Growing up, there was no shortage of duck hunting-related artwork around my parents’ house. Although I always consid- ered wood ducks more breathtaking, especially the brilliantly colored male, with his sweeping, glossy green head outlined in white, his iridescent chestnut flanks, the sight of his agile and athletic silhouette cutting through a wooded swamp or creek, most of the images I recall featured mallards, always a pair, and always depicted in the open air, their rigid wings spread in a downward pitch as the birds descended onto some body of still water in that magical and fleeting moment when they seem almost to hover and float before touching down. Such visions, along with the thought of sharing a lakeside blind with a friend, a retrieving dog, and a thermos of hot coffee, is what encouraged me, many years ago, to give duck hunting a try. It was certainly all this, and more. But I was never much of a hunter and it was fly fishing that eventually lured me away, into a pair of chest waders and into a trout stream where, with a sensitive and whippy tipped magic wand in my hand I could project the most beautiful and elegant loops over the river’s surface, loops that would angle and arc and slowly unfold as line, leader, and fly softly descended to the surface where the real magic could happen. As I progressed in the sport of fly fishing, I came to immerse myself in the art of fly tying, partly because those who knew, the old men who’d spent their entire lives casting flies, told me that this was the other half of fly fishing, and also because I grew to realize that if I tied my own flies rather than buying them in the store, I could construct them exactly as I pleased. I’d always been enamored with the idea of spending the cold winter months at home, sitting behind a fly-tying vise, my dog on the floor at my feet, a fire crackling behind the hearth, warm and comfortable and content with the thought of gearing up for 194 The Meadow